ROMAN ROADS AND ROMAN PARIS. Lee Bryant sent me a link to this wonderful site about what remains in Paris of the ancient Roman city. I posted here about how straight and severe the Roman roads were. This discussion of the Roman grid in Lutetia (ancient Paris) points out the the Roman planners ignored previous settlement patterns in laying out main streets of Lutetia to conform to a theoretical, strictly orthogonal town grid. The discussion notes the few deviations from the grid pattern because of peculiarities of the terrain. It appears that the location of the main road of Lutetia was a major reason why the Paris location was important to the Romans: “There is no evidence that this road existed under the Gauls, or even that there was another river crossing at Paris…..On both banks, other major roads joined up with it to take advantage of this crossing. Lutetia thus appears to have been a “bridge town” that took its place in the great Gallo-Roman road network.”
Archive for April, 2007
ROMAN ROADS AND ROMAN PARIS.
Monday, April 30th, 2007ARE THE VERY POOR DOING BETTER?
Sunday, April 29th, 2007ARE THE VERY POOR DOING BETTER? I missed the point of Dick Weisfelder’s comment on my post HOW TO LIVE ON ONE DOLLAR A DAY. Dick wrote, “I wonder whether pundits who measure the percentage living on a dollar a day have controlled for inflation and the buying power of the dollar. Moreover, I remember reading something that pointed out the following. Hypothetically 20% of people could move from 98ยข per day to $1.02 producing the sort of data described above, but with no meaningful change in their situation whatsoever.” I responded: “These studies are supposed to have been corrected for price changes. At this level of income, measurement errors could make a large difference. And measurement problems mean for me that I am reluctant to draw conclusions except when the differences are quite large. And there is something baffling for us in the Western world: can it really be one dollar a day? Nevertheless, I think these conclusions hold up. This is how a lot of people live.” I was so happy to have a link to the article by Banerjee and Duflo, which contains so many important facts, that I passed right over the claim by Tim Horford that the percentage of people living on one dollar a day declined from about 40% to 20% from 1981 to 2001. I agree with Dick. I don’t think we can make precise measurements on this issue. Horford relied for his statement on this article by Chen and Ravaillon. I would highlight the first sentence of the article: “A cloud of doubt hangs over our knowledge of the extent of the world’s progress against poverty.” A couple interesting points from their article: Chen and Ravaillon find that more people living on $2 a day became worse off during the period from 1981 to 2001 than those who gained. The improvement they find took place entirely in China. The number of people living on $1 a day outside China increased during the period.
NUTRITION AND THE VERY POOR.
Saturday, April 28th, 2007NUTRITION AND THE VERY POOR. The article by Banerjee and Duflo asks “Why the poor don’t eat more?” but then raises questions about whether better nutrition has been important in improving world health and in increasing productivity. Robert Fogel in THE ESCAPE FROM HUNGER AND PREMATURE DEATH argues for the importance of improved nutrition for health and productivity. This review has a number of fascinating points from Fogel’s book, including that the energy value of the typical diet in France in the early 1700’s was the same as that of Ruanda in 1965 (Ruanda was the most malnourished country in 1965). I am persuaded that if the very poor had more food, they would be more productive.
HOW DO THE VERY POOR MAKE A LIVING?
Friday, April 27th, 2007HOW DO THE VERY POOR MAKE A LIVING? The Banerjee and Duflo article generalizes about how the very poor make their livings. A large percentage of them are entrepreneurs–that is, self-employed. Many have multiple occupations. Agriculture is of less importance than I would have thought. In Udaipur, only 19% if households list agriculture as their main source of income. Being a daily laborer is the main source of income, and that daily labor usually involves temporary migration, usually for a month or so at a time. The very poor do not have specialized skills (an absence related to multiple occupations and temporary employment). They have few opportunities to save and get any kind of return on their savings. I argued earlier that a reason (other than the return on the related business investment) that microfinance is helpful for development is that knowing how to use markets is a valuable skill. Banerjee and Duflo add another reason: borrowing provides “a disciplined way to save—by paying down the loan.”
THE OTHER EXPENDITURES OF THE VERY POOR.
Thursday, April 26th, 2007THE OTHER EXPENDITURES OF THE VERY POOR. What do people with less than one dollar a day income spend their money on–other than the calories to live on? You could think of these expenditures as little luxuries that people choose despite the fact that they are undernourished. The article by Banerjee and Duflo that I linked to yesterday makes a strict comparison with spending all one’s income to get the most calories. Looked at this way, in Udaipur, any expenditure on food other than millet is an extra expenditure. The poor allocate about one third of their grain budget on rice and wheat, which are more expensive per calorie than millet. About 10% of their total budget goes to sugar and processed foods. About half of each increase in expenditure on food goes to more calories; about half goes to more expensive food. In Udaipur most of the extremely poor households have a bed or cot; about half have a clock or watch; about 10% have a radio; and about 10% have a chair or stool. In Udaipur, households spend about 5% of their total annual budgets on alcohol and tobacco. Desperately hungry people want more than bare subsistence.
HOW TO LIVE ON ONE DOLLAR A DAY.
Wednesday, April 25th, 2007HOW TO LIVE ON ONE DOLLAR A DAY. Tim Horford (the Undercover Economist) reports in this article on how people live on one dollar a day. It is estimated that 21% of the people in the world lived on less than one dollar a day in 2001. The good news is that twenty years earlier, in 1981, 40% of the people in the world lived on less than a dollar a day. Horford relies on a moving description of the lives of the very poor by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. These people are heartbreakingly poor. During the course of a year, in 37% of these households, the adults in the household went without a meal for an entire day. In Udaipur, India, 55% of the adult poor are anemic. Yet these extremely poor people do not spend all their income on food. They do not live on bread alone. The median extremely poor household in Udaipur spent 10% of its annual income on festivals, including weddings, funerals and religious festivals.
THE IDEAL IS SOME TRAFFIC AND SOME ACCIDENTS.
Tuesday, April 24th, 2007THE IDEAL IS SOME TRAFFIC AND SOME ACCIDENTS. Economists are trained not to look for perfection. The profession deals with optimizing subject to limitations on resources. Thus, economists look for trade offs and believe there are always possibilities for substitution. (One common example is that a sweater can substitute for a certain amount of heating oil). When I was studying economics in the sixties, there was an economist named Stefan Valavanis-Vail whose articles I sought out because he was a gifted teacher. Memorably, he pointed out that for an economist, the goal is not to eliminate traffic accidents. An economist would expect an optimum to involve some traffic and some accidents. Ironically and tragically, he was killed by a stray bullet at a young age.
REDUCING TRAFFIC ACCIDENTS BY INCREASING RISK.
Monday, April 23rd, 2007REDUCING TRAFFIC ACCIDENTS BY INCREASING RISK. The weekend Financial Times had an article about experiments (often referred to as Shared Space projects) in a large number of cities to make streets more people friendly by making roads “look like lanes not thoroughfares.” For me, any car free zone is immensely attractive. One of the techniques used is to eliminate stoplights on the theory that a little bit of risk reduces accidents by making people more careful. The claim is that traffic accidents are reduced when it is not clear who has the right of way. This reminds me of Armen Alchian’s proposal that in order to reduce accidents, safety harnesses should be replaced with a large spike mounted in the middle of the steering wheel.
BASKETBALL–AN EXPERIMENT THAT FAILED.
Sunday, April 22nd, 2007BASKETBALL–AN EXPERIMENT THAT FAILED. A follow up on an earlier post. I had posted at the beginning of the basketball season that the Bulls this year would test the importance of defense versus offense for a basketball team. I had thought that the Bulls were unbalanced this year in emphasizing defense rather than offense. Charles Barkley had expressed the same thought. It turned out, however, that the Bulls were about the same on defense as in past years (using field goal percentage against as a metric) and some what better on offense than in past years because of improvement by young players. So the experiment never took place.
SOMETIMES YOU CAN BE TOO PRETTY.
Sunday, April 22nd, 2007SOMETIMES YOU CAN BE TOO PRETTY. I posted earlier on the fussy literalism of New York theater critics, noting especially John Simon’s running joke that only beautiful women could play characters who were supposed to be attractive. Hilton Als has an interesting twist on this literalism in his New Yorker review of the current production of A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN. O’Neill’s heroine is supposed to almost a freak at five foot eleven and 180 pounds. Als thinks Eve Best is a fine actress but unfortunately she is “slim-hipped and lovely” so that casting her “has sacrificed something that is essential to our understanding of [the heroine]. Als refers to “Best’s deficiencies” in comparing her to Colleen Dewhurst (who gave a wonderful performance in the play in 1973, although I had thought that it was her acting rather than her appearance which made her so wonderful). I disagree with the assumption that O’Neill’s heroine must be powerfully built in order to show that she could be capable of taking over her father’s farm if she chose. I have the impression that, perhaps by necessity, small men and women ran farms in the past, but my main disagreement is that I believe audiences can make imaginative leaps. Think of Shakespeare’s audiences, confronted with the boy playing Lady Macbeth.
